unifin

In response to some posts about enhancement shaman survivability struggles, I'm actually fairly optimistic about the way the spec is going to pan out with the appropriate and obvious nerfs to certain out-of-control burst specs along with the accumulation of greater resilience.

Regarding going toe-to-toe with melee, only mutilate rogues tend to give me fits (aside from prot warriors, which simply take forever). An IBF-d DK is quite dangerous, but the obvious damage reduction should be a warning bell to slap on a shield, pop shamrage and kite. It's pretty easy to rune-starve the DK with earthen power, imp ghost wolf, disease cleansing totem, and frost shock, heal up with a couple stacks of MW, and then imp fire nova totem --> hex appropriately as a defensive or offensive measure.

With ret paladins, negating the initial hammer of justice is the biggest issue. frost shock and kite to force the freedom, after which you purge or frost shock again, pop wolves, novastun-->hex, etc. etc. Eye for an eye is annoying as it eats grounding totem, though. Good rets will JoJ, but many will not, giving you free rein to kite and whittle them down, purging art of war as appropriate. Once the lol-bubble nerf goes through, it should become quite a bit easier.

Imp. Hamstring + bladestorm gimmick is regrettable, but hamstring is dispellable, and imp ghost wolf can negate the majority of BS's whirlwinds if you're quick. Again, the problem most people make when playing enhancement is thinking that we can go toe-to-toe with the plate classes. Enhancement has become a significantly more mobile spec, but hardly anybody that I've seen plays it that way.

In particular, imp fire nova totem --> hex has saved my ass a countless number of times even with the terrible amount of resilience my shaman has atm, and I'm surprised I haven't seen it mentioned more often.

As for improving enhancement's survivability in arenas, I see several issues, most tied to battling mages of various specs, and other casters with peel assist.

The primary problem, as I see it, isn't the lack of tools, but too many functions applied to tools with limiting cooldowns.

Whereas rogues with the proper spec can apply the 3 most powerful pvp debuffs (MS, CoT, Crip) within seconds, enhancement shamans must choose to interrupt or snare. The rogue will open from stealth, hamstring isn't tied to pummel's CD. DKs have some issues regarding chains of ice's dispellability, but they also have fantastic defensive cooldowns and the ultimate anti-caster tool, AMS. Ret paladins have a similar problem, but cleanse, freedom, and a 6-second glyphed stun on a 30 second cooldown combined with amazingly consistent burst seem to balance their lack of a true snare.

Earthbind totem is useful, but has an extremely limited range and is now more useful for countering peels than it is for keeping an enemy close.

Similarly, shamrage is a great mitigation tool, but it's also our only way of regaining mana quickly. On the other hand, ret paladins' mana regen (jotw) is directly tied to their attack cycle.

Similarly, wolves are quite powerful when they're up and spirit walk is a fantastic ability, but it not only requires 2 GCDs to use reactively, during which you can't resnare the target, but relies on the sacrifice of a powerful survival cooldown.

The tools are there, but the offensive and defensive abilities are linked on somewhat prohibitive cooldowns.

I would recommend unlinking shocks (or at least removing wind shock from the shock CD), changing shamrage to a straight mana regen ability, adding a baseline shaman IBF for the 30% dmg reduction, and either shortening wolf CD to 2 minutes (perhaps glyphed) or making spirit walk useable apart from popping feral spirit.

Perhaps the solution might be to keep feral spirit's cooldown at 3 minutes or increase it to 5, but make the wolves permanent pets while they're alive and nerf spirit hunt accordingly if the self-healing is out of control.

 

Twinky

Unfortunately I have very limited experience with arenas post Wrath and not on my main character, rather an alt.

I'm beginning to question the need for talents that stop dispels working to their full effect, in terms of the meta game cleansing/dispelling have become next to non-existent. Wound poison for example could be somewhat combated in terms of keeping the stack under-control and knowing that if it did fall off the rogue would either have to use some GCD's to get it back up or play the RNG game for at least a while if it was not on their off hand weapon.

I think that now would be the perfect time to remove those talented effects (mana drains such as viper I'm a little cautious of if it remains a hunters bread and butter should the survival game come back in full force). But wound/mind numbing and a plethora of trash debuffs which some do nothing and others are there simply to be buffers on an already annoying mechanic that is the RNG of the defensive dispels. I think now that if a one of these classes (I'll pick on the rogues heh) should let their target(s) get out of reach, or they perform a peel correctly that player or their partner should have the opportunity to remove and get a few seconds guaranteed removal of *some* of the debuffs applied at the expense of the all important GCD's, especially with poisons from rogues now how they are.

I'd argue that wound is most definitely the most powerful MS effect in the game currently and even something like BOP gives you no break from it and we know the healer isn't going to waste (or ret pally ehnc shaman etc) GCD's to play the RNG game to try and get their abilities back to 100% for that time, LOS peels included.

Perhaps my lack of expience is showing and healing at 100% for that time would indeed be unbalanced (although I can't see ms/wound poison etc being off their intended target for longer then 10 seconds, which with the way burst is should be well withing the realm of reasonable).

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...Conversion.png

 

Traj

I can understand the need for dispel protection for certain classes and abilities. Dots for spriests and locks and diseases for DKs are so integral to the classes and the damage they do it should be difficult to remove those effects. But the effects that are CC or snare need to not have dispel protection. Watching a priest spam dispel on a slow effect only to fail 3 times and have it fall off naturally is just dumb. Allow the better players with faster reaction times to take advantage of their skill, not be owned by RNG again and again. Such abilities also need to be the first ability a dispel removes, you should not be forced to RNG your way through all the trash buffs. I shouldn't feel a need to tell a priest to not waste his mana trying to dispel. Really, all MS effects should be dispelable or they should just get rid of them altogether, balancing around them is a pain. That is another discussion though.

They need to do three things asap. Arena will still be unbalanced but it will be a drastic improvement.
1. Nerf the obvious burst problems, some abilities or combos need delicate touch but things like POM Pyro need to be hit into the ground.
2. Gives clothies +armor without charging their item value, this goes for warlocks and priests. Mages do not need +armor unless they nerf the kiting of frost mage.
3. They need to take into account survivability v damage/burst. You can't have the best of both worlds.

Really, they need two rule sets badly but they are either too proud or stubborn, or both, to do that.

 

Hoffski

Kiting?

Dispel assisted melee trains have been raping mages for seasons and I don't see anything different now. I certainly enjoy having less armor now at level 80 than I did in my level 70 pvp gear.

 

Complex

This is Serennia's imposed solution on fixing dispel resistance RNG. Would just require some consideration from bliz as to what values to assign to what magic effects.

 

Calantus

A less complex system is to just work with what they've got and have the lifebloom/unstable affliction model for some things, immunity to dispel for others, then have stacking for the ones where they want only partial protection. Putting 2 stacks on wound poison for example (maximum of 2 stacks, each application applies 2 stacks) would be an easy way to afford it some protection without the rng aspect.

 

moowalk

I think the best example of the absurdity of dispel resistance occurs when a ret paladin HoJs the rogue in my 3v3. Ideally I'd dispel the HoJ ~1 second after it lands, and the paladin who's still on the gcd isn't able to damage the rogue while he's stunned. However, since dispel can fail multiple times, this is far too risky an option. I can't afford to stop healing and take the risk that the dispel fails, since the rogue will likely be dead if dice rolls go against me.

As always, the best option to fix dispel mechanics is the simplest. Ditch dispel resist talents, change them to 100% dispel resists on certain spells if necessary and balance accordingly. It's not as if shamans and priests are over represented at the moment.

 

Mearis

Offensive dispelling is mostly dead, simply because nobody has the spare GCD's to actually dispell the target.

I had a particularly enjoyable arena evening yesterday when we ran nonstop into ret paladin/DK/x 3 dps teams that would faceroll me open with strangulate, killing me before I had any GCDs.

I had 5 or 6 games where I started with prayer of mending/power word shield/750 resilience and would get strangulated and die before it would wear off. The worst part was that the DK would put anti-magic zone over the area where they were zerging me so my partners couldn't even retaliate by killing one of them while they were zerging me.

BTW:
"State of the Game" Class Balance Report | World of Ming | WoW Riot | WotLK, Wrath of the Lich King, WoW, World of Warcraft, Arena Season 4

is absolutely a pro read and I agree with about 95% of what he said. There are two things which I think need to be fixed: removing all the anti-fear mechanics currently in game so priests/warlocks can actually use it for peel, and taking a hard look at how immunities work in arena.

<manly> then my sister calls and proposes the one thing that has never before occured in my entire life

 

moowalk

Yes and No. A well timed mass dispel is just as clutch as ever. And it seems like every team has a of paladin or mage.

 

SentinelBorg

Yes, kiting can work, but most time you just don't have the time for it. And the nova thing, as soon as more shamans will use it, others will learn to macro/kill it fast.

I made the same observation concerning our cooldowns. We just have too often make decisions between utility, offense and defense, past the standard single cooldown, global cooldown and resource limitations, that also the other classes have.

As I just wrote in the german board yesterday, best thing would be to remove the shared shock cooldown, increase the shock cooldown to 8 sec, give earth shock another effect (something that reduces enemies' damage would be nice) and split up shamanistic rage in two parts, one being a baseline damage reducing ability for all shamans.

As for the wolves, they could make them baseline, while moveing lava burst into the elemental tree. Enhancement then could become a new 51pt talent:

• Astral Walk: Partially shifts the shaman to the astral plane. While under this effect, the shaman becomes completly immun (just like bubble) and gains 60% runspeed. The effect ends after 6 seconds or when the shaman uses an offensive ability (doing damage, but not heals/totems). 1 min cooldown.

 

Mearis

Yeah this is true - but it is exceedingly rare that I have spare GCDs to throw out the mass dispells. Yesterday most of my matches ended with me having literally zero GCDs and dying during the opening strangulate against ret/dk/arcane mage.

I think the point I am making is that if you have enough 'free' GCD's to throw out mass-dispells, odds are you are already winning.

<manly> then my sister calls and proposes the one thing that has never before occured in my entire life

 

Gourd

I find myself usually able to get a mass dispel off against ret/dk when my partner blinds the dk right as the paladin bubbles (gives me just enough time to get it off before strangulate), however a resist seems to more often than not lead to a loss for us. However as you said, this is essentially never possible in 3v3.

 

Mearis

In this case though, the matches literally went like this:

DK/ret paladin/arcane mage run mounted charging us. DK strangulates me, drops on top of me, drops anti-magic zone. Ret/DK/arcane mage drop all cooldowns, I die, go in angel form - they run around a corner, paladin bubbles, drops Hls on all his team-mates, then they finish off 3 vs 2.

I had most matches where I had 0 GCD's that I could use. I should point out that I was dying with shield/prayer of mending/full resilience gear, and with both BR/FW. The one match that we won our mage used imp CS instantly on their mage to lower their burst, their mage iceblocked to remove imp CS offensively, and we managed to zerg their mage down just before I died because their ret paladin was slow on bop and their dk was slow on AMZ.

<manly> then my sister calls and proposes the one thing that has never before occured in my entire life

 

Taja

While I do think burst is way too high, I really don’t want to go back in towards the season 4 drawn out games. Now I have done my 11k fireball / 8 barrages fair share on people for a 2 shot but overall melee is just dominating even more then it does in previous season. 1 more melee class just means more teams stack 2 melee instead of caster/melee. Stacking more melee is so much ‘easier’ since melee revolves around getting to a target and casters of getting away from target. I’ts so much harder to have 2 people trying to control multiple targets all the time with DR then it is to just double zerg 1 player the whole time. There are more stuns, more slowing effects and more ranged attack from all the melee classes now making the long kites harder and harder. Dispellers on both sides are always in favour of the melee. Hopefully some new kind of dispel system is going to make some sense, and new uses for resilience so your pretty much obligated to wear it.

 

Zavior

I was suprised to see so many fine ideas on serennias post. Too bad most of them will most likely take quite a long time to happen, or just not happen at all. I agree with Taja that resilience needs some new uses, cloth users wont survive that much longer even when resilience capped to make much of a difference. A flat out damage reduction might suffice, but that would be a bandaid at best. The sheer amount of damage certain classes can dish out wont be fixed with that. On my priest, the only time I have actually used dispel has been against warlocks, and in the state they are in it didn't really matter. I would gladly go to season 4 lenght games instead of what we current have - I could actually feel like I'm using my abilites and communicating with my team to chain up cc's etc. Blizzard is clearly moving away from that kind of arena, and it isn't a bad thing for the game lenght part. But quite clearly they went overboard with this. In my opinion the ideal arena game would last from one to five minutes.

 

• Juice

Wow, I can't agree even a little bit with removing anti-fear mechanics (tremor, dispell, wotf, fear ward, etc). Perhaps my ass still stings from the raping I received from warlocks deathcoiling, fearing, and then taking 50-60% of my health while I ran around like a jackass - but fear is strong. It's spammable, one completely loses control while under its effect, and one still takes damage while feared. I've found it to be one of the more frustrating CCs in the game.

 

Mearis

My concern is more about using fear as a defensive CC to stay alive rather than using fear offensively while dotting people up. Perhaps a better alternative would be adding a glyph that would make fear instantly break on damage but made it resistent to lichborn/wotf/tremor/berserker rage?

Right now using it to get breathing room is nearly pointless, and there is a 30 second cooldown before you can use it again.

<manly> then my sister calls and proposes the one thing that has never before occured in my entire life

 

• Snowy

Didn't they change fear to break much more reliably on a percentage of damage done? It's honestly hard for me to have noticed since you simply don't see warlocks, and of course priest fear is not spammable.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

Duilliath

Juice, remember Mearis is posting as a priest (- though I seriously doubt you managed to forget/overlook it...)

One of the major flaws with fear is that both Warlocks and Priests have it. The priests' version is nowhere near what the warlocks' version is, but both have the same effect and are pretty much counted as the same sort of defense. I still think that having those two as the exact same effect makes it next to impossible to balance.
A one-shot fear on a semi-long cooldown just can not be balanced against a fear that can be reapplied at will and will in no way compare as a CC.

[e] Holy crap I'm slow.

An thenn tehy wuz al ded. Srsly. (Exodus 1)

 

Mearis

I haven't checked myself, but is anyone actually masochistic enough to pvp as shadow right now?

<manly> then my sister calls and proposes the one thing that has never before occured in my entire life

 

• Snowy

I think I've seen one shadow priest. (and naturally we bursted him down)

I checked all the old patch notes and didn't see a mention of it. Maybe I'm just thinking of a blue post that was discussing possible changed. It wouldn't be a bad route to go, I think everyone can agree that going from 60% to dead with a full stack of dots on you while feared is bullshit. Honestly at this point, they could also change fear to root the target and put them in the cower animation, that would have the side affect of fixing all the annoying bugs and situations that pop up from random fear movements. There's way too much RNG there, it's great when you fear a rogue and the fear path proceeds to follow you wherever you go, and equally frustrating for the other team when the fear sometimes takes your healer 100 yards away the opposite direction.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

Mearis

Yeah, I feel kinda guilty of the same - when we were levelling in the 1600s we actually saw a few warlocks, and every time we saw one, our strategy immediately was - ok, burst him down, just go all out on him. Same exact thing when we saw a priest that was actually casting penance - you cannot risk killing a priest first in case he is angel, but if he is using penance, just burst him down.

It feels a bit like clubbing endangered baby seals

<manly> then my sister calls and proposes the one thing that has never before occured in my entire life

 

• Shabadu

I think more healers need access to a talent like Astral Shift that reduces damage during stuns and silence. Then you turn silence away from a method for burning down a healer while he can't spend any gcd to save his life into a way to prevent heals on teammates. That shifts the burden of survival onto the teammate and whether or not he can save his own life with cooldowns, cc or LOS etc. The healer classes also have the traditionally weak hybrids (spriests, enhance, feral) that have fewer survival options, and giving them access to it would be good for just about every spec.

 

Duilliath

Maeris - I think that fear change was part of a global overhaul, same as frost novas or roots breaking after a certain amount of damage. Didn't you ask about it in the Simple Questions - Druid thread?

Shabadu, I hate saying this, but I really fear that giving druids (and thus possibly Ferals) yet another damage reduction might be rather hazardous, unless it's really high in the resto tree. The upcoming armour changes will already make Ferals far more resilient.

An thenn tehy wuz al ded. Srsly. (Exodus 1)

 

Talgog

Let's be honest, when people complain about fear, they aren't thinking about priests. Juice is posting as a shaman. From my experience with my warlock alt, well, if the shaman didn't get a grounding totem down, I could fearlock any shaman to death. Four level difference, epics versus greens, resto/enhance/elemental, etc. And my warlock never had particularly good gear.

Throw in a felguard intercept or felhunter silence at the end, but whatever. Shaman have every right to feel traumatized about fear without counters.

This is a chronic problem with fear. It's way too powerful against someone who can't break it, and it's useless against someone with multiple breaks and immunities. This goes to locks in general - beyond enraging to fight if they can control the fight, but a smear on the floor if they can't. The number of classes that have "NOW I COME AT YOU HARDER" offensive fear bubbles is directly tied to the non-existence of locks in PvP right now.